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by madaxe_again 242 days ago
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.

I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.

1 comments

Again, distinguishing "advocacy" as your criteria for censorship is censoring on interpretation. I know you are sincere in your opinions about this, they won't change, and I even share them.

They are still our opinions. We share the planet with people who think, equally inflexibly, that the bible does not advocate for slavery and genocide. And the way we do that without resorting to terrible violence (including slavery and genocide!) is by agreeing to disagree by not censoring each other.

But it does, and explicitly - it isn’t a matter of interpretation. Repeatedly god commands his followers to slaughter men, women, children, and even the animals of their foes. Repeatedly god tells his followers to enslave people, and that it’s fine to treat them abysmally as long as it’s not so bad that they die.

This isn’t my opinion of what the bible contains - any more than I could argue that Hellraiser is a cute movie about bunny rabbits.

Not all facts are subjective.

"The bible is not a matter of interpretation" is literally, literally how you end up in religious wars. Seriously?
"I want to kill people and eat their firstborns", what interpretations can you come up for me?
First, I'm an atheist. I'm on your side.

But as a practical matter, I'll point out that trying to ban the interpretation held by the three billion or whatever practicing christians on the planet is a better way to end up as a sacrifice on that altar than to improve the world.

Look, this whole idea is dumb. No, F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of denying religion to make a bunch of intemperate nerds like us happy. Are we really having this fight?

The reality of what is in the bible is not, no. It is written, in black and white. Yes you could argue about gnostic gospels and shit but what people accept to be the Bible has been a static set of texts for centuries now.

Now, anyway, you need to stop talking smack about my mother, and I disliked the death threat you made just there, and I don’t need to know about what you do with fish in the bedroom.

There is no reasonable reading of the bible which fits your narrative.